Sustainability can get a bit of a bad rap, but Studio Swine are one of many outfits showing that connotations of hemp trousers and the like are daft and outdated. The duo – who scrubbed up very well indeed in our Winter edition of Printed Pages – has recently added yet another string to their sustainable-but-beautiful bow in the form of these sumptuous Gyrecraft pieces. The decidedly opulent looking works were created thanks to an arduous 1000 nautical mile journey across the seas, which saw a crew using a “Solar Extruder” to draw plastic from the waters. The device works by harnessing sunlight to melt and extrude plastic from the sea, and these little fragments were then used to create five gorgeous objets d’art, one representing each of the five major ocean gyres.

Human Organs-on-Chips has been announced as the Design Museum’s Designs of the Year 2015 winner. Designed by Donald Ingber and Dan Dongeun Huh at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute, the chips are devices that carry “living human cells that mimic the complex tissue structures, functions and mechanical motions of whole organs,” says the Design Museum.

“The team of scientists that produced this remarkable object don’t come from a conventional design background. But what they have done is clearly a brilliant piece of design,” says Design Museum director Deyan Sudjic. “They identified a serious problem; how do we predict how human cells will behave, and they solved it with elegance and economy of means, putting technology from apparently unrelated fields to work in new ways."

Powers of Ten is a 1977 film the Eames office made for IBM. It begins with a couple having a picnic in a Michigan park before zooming out every 10 seconds by a factor of 10. It travels as far as 100 million light years into outer space before going into reverse, the camera rocketing back to Earth, back to the USA, back to the park, back to the couple and then onwards into the body of the man we first saw, down through his skin and into his cells.

One glance at Instagram or any interiors blog circa 2015 and it feels like marble, or at least cheap mimicries, are decorating homes everywhere. But there’s none of the ubiquitous “funky” accessory holders or dinnerware in Tomás Alonso’s marble-based project, Lines & Waves. Exploring pattern and stackability, Tomas’ interlocking tables are a thing of true beauty. Machine-milled grooves have been cut into the top and bottom of marble blocks creating objects that look like crinkled salami and giant McCoy’s crisps.

Bigger is always better they say, but when you live in a flat or anywhere that’s not a barn this is impossible, as far as furniture’s concerned. Days spent walking around furniture shops, friends’ houses and skips armed with a tape measure and a recurring sense of disappointment can become disheartening even for the most optimistic shopper. You’re left with a choice; either learn carpentry or buy a table that will give you bruised shins every time you squeeze past. But fear not, for product design company Be-elastic has created SNAP to end all your table-top woes.

We’re drawn to a lot of the projects we cover by their aesthetic qualities but sometimes it seems right and proper to flag up something whose form may not promise much, but whose function is really exciting. So it is with Jorg Neugebauer and Kai Wiehagen’s ChargeDoubler, a USB that halves your charging speed to get your phone back up and running in super quick time.